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May 06, 2011
About half-way to the New School there is a man with one leg who stands with his crutches in the same spot on the same street every day. I see him only on my morning commute. He does not appear to be begging because it is a poor spot to be doing so. He looks at the people passing, the cars. I looked into his eyes once. He seems to be a gentle, kind man. Not angry or forlorn. He has a salt and pepper beard, very deep-set eyes. He wears typical village garb, a black and white shawl over his shoulder, a turban. Pashtun. I wonder of course how he lost his leg. Afghans are still suffering from the Soviet war, on top of the current duel war. (I redefine the current conflicts thusly: NATO vs. Insurgency and Taliban vs. Northern Alliance Jihadi Warlords.) Personnel land mines littler the landscape, including the kind dropped from the sky like Biblical frogs. But there are a multitude of possible limb threatening events in Kabul alone. The man could have simply been caught between two cars. Sometimes when I go off the soccer field into the weeds to retrieve a stray ball I think about where I place my feet, which makes me think about destiny. I asked the older boys the question I’d asked the girls, what percent of their lives they owe to destiny and what percent to self-determination. They answered unequivocally in favor of destiny, all eight of them 90% or above. This is paradoxical. Albeit some of the girls said fifty/fifty, they were primarily on the side of self-determination. How much this has to do with their unique AFCECO upbringing in a country where men rule like slave owners and two women are required as legal witnesses to equal one man’s testimony, I leave to your imagination. I can say that the boys are not simply espousing a religious fatalism that we in the west have come to stigmatize Moslems with, given the focus on vest bombers raised to believe they are doing God’s will on their way to Paradise. At least for the boys in my class, I think this nod toward destiny comes more from a place of humility. You can just sense it in the room. We’ve talked about religion before. To varying degrees, though they identify themselves to be Moslem, they are not ideologues. I do not think they would look at the one-legged man and say it was his destiny to be crippled. Never before as an educator or a counselor have I been so inclined and able to compare boys and girls to such a degree. Having them in separate classes I do my best to be the same teacher, the same person. I’m sure I am different in certain ways, though I can’t pinpoint them exactly. Generally the girls are freer, the boys more disciplined, the girls exhibit more rounded wisdom, the boys an aura of service and purposefulness. When I set limits on the girls, they practically laugh, at first. The boys take me entirely seriously. The girls bond, the boys stand together but separately. In some ways I may as well be comparing south to north, tropical climate culture to cold. When we talk about equality, we know what we mean, not that we are all the same. What we mean is equal opportunity, equal rights, equal support. One group of girls is reading The Miracle Worker, the other group is reading Animal Farm. In one, a strange woman (culture) is gradually liberating a child and by proxy her entire family and perhaps an old social system from darkness, while in the other a society through revolution lifts the darkness but slowly allows the darkness to descend once again. In one there is apotheosis for all, in the other only a vicious cycle. I believe that the one is a model for just how the empowerment of women could and would break some of these vicious cycles of human history, and the latter is sadly still a relevant model for how things have continued in our patriarchal world. Though Orwell’s fable was specifically directed toward a fascist realm in the early 1940s and Stalin’s Soviet Union, we need not look far from our own back yard to find all the familiar characters, Napoleon and his Squealer, the revisionists and propagandists and the various methods of obtaining and retaining power at the expense of original ideals. When I go to class, when I converse with the girls and then the boys, back and forth over and over again, I begin to see a light, a balance that can exist even though they are artificially seperated. The more months I spend with AFCECO, the more I believe that the path to progress for civilization depends not so much on faith, on philosophical innovations, on invention and ideals, but on something so entirely basic it passes through the discerning sieve of academia, the media and the lawmakers without nary a serious and definitive nod: an end to the dominance by men, equality for women, and an ennoblement of women as go-to people for the affairs of civilized society. Ok, here's a highfalutin statement almost as bombastic as Tolstoy proclaiming the righteousness of celibacy after having 13 children: Freud needs to be put to rest. With almost seven billion people in the world and diminishing resources we (in particular men) as sentient beings, if that is indeed what we are, must transcend procreation and sexuality as the primary forces in the categories of survival, pleasure and self-worth. They will be there, they will always be there, but the liberation I experience in both boys and girls in my classes has to be considered as some sort of barometer. It is not as if they are suppressed and this separation results in their inability to work together. They are together on committees, in organizing events, in extracurriculars, and as I watch their mentors, college students who have graduated from this temporary cloistering, both young men and women working together, I see a mutual respect and collective spirit that is refreshing. Even as I try to be decisive I don’t know what I believe. I think both groups would just as soon prefer to have co-educational classrooms. There is a stigma attached to separation that carries with it the aura of inequality on one level or another, that girls are somehow “different” and therefore should be treated differently. I can only say that from my perspective, I simply don’t see things so clear cut as I used to. When I watch the girls compete on the soccer field, I see the same determination, the same ability to work as a team, the same rejoicing in victory and the same desire to get up off the grass and start again. When I see the boys dancing together at a wedding, holding hands, huddling around one another to tell secret stories I do not see them as weak. These juxtapositions dominate our discourse, still, about gender. I’m talking about something else, I hope. I remember Mahbooba, the first month I lived in Mehan orphanage, waiting with me to get a plate of shola for dinner. I waved her on, “You go first,” I said. She looked at me with such scorn. Why? she asked. Do you think I am so weak that I must be fed before you? My very own chivalry had been blown to pieces. I look around Kabul and I see men without legs, and women begging for food. I see children, girls as much as boys scampering through traffic like so many little blood cells swimming through arteries, looking for oxygen. War and the endless cycle of patriarchal decision making has yet to prove to this teacher the two can pave the way for a promised land. I would like to see what the Annie Sullivan’s of the world might make of it, if given their chance. 
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